New York Magazine December 16-29, 2024

1 New York’s 20th annual “Reasons to Love New York” issue (December 2–15) catalogued 39 things that make us love this city at this moment. For the occasion, and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live, the magazine corralled 60 SNL luminaries and photographer David LaChapelle to create a foldout cover. On Instagram, @sirstinson called it “a reason to still have print in 2024—magazines that treat covers like art. I wanna see all 5 panels not on my phone screen!” Will Sloan said he “was doing ‘Where’s Waldo’ for Joe Piscopo and I found him.” Wesley Boutilier joked that he was “going feral over these covers like a tween buying Tiger Beat in 2004.” Inside the magazine, readers appreciated how the list captured the city’s unique charm. Commenter…

INSIDE: Proper hydration with Alex Cooper / Luigi Mangione’s online footprint THE PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITION is a curious ritual. Obviously, the stakes are high. Personnel is policy: Cabinet and staffing picks signal the administration’s real priorities. And yet because these decisions take place during the interregnum, an uncanny period when the outgoing president is still in office (in body, if not in mind), a sense of pageantry and weightlessness attends the whole thing, as if the incoming president were merely casting a film about the White House. This effect is enhanced, of course, when the incoming president is Donald Trump. He has fully internalized Saul Bellow’s maxim “Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain it.” Trump selects candidates for top jobs who look the part and doubts those…

I’M THE WORST person to interview because I’ve detailed what the inside of my vagina looks like. I’ve said everything,” podcast princess Alex Cooper tells me as we sit side by side on a red velvet banquette at the clubstaurant Jean’s on Lafayette Street. There’s a DJ nearby, but she’s refusing to let the music drown her out. “I talk loud. I fucking scream. I promise I won’t spit on you. Okay? Welcome to the chaos!” Tonight is the launch party for Cooper’s “enhanced electrolyte beverage,” Unwell Hydration. It’s basically girlie Gatorade. Unwell is also the name of her podcast network, and it’s her first branded lifestyle product (with more to come, no doubt). Just 48 hours earlier, Cooper had posted details about the event to her Instagram, inviting members…

AS SOON AS THE IDENTITY of Luigi Mangione, the man alleged to have shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was revealed, the online hunt—a familiar collective ritual—began. The basic dossier came together fast: Mangione had accounts on X, on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Goodreads. There was, maybe, a Tinder profile; finding his Reddit took a day. Reporters and social-media users noted possible retrospective red flags, eerie fragments of information, and small ironies. On Goodreads, Mangione had posted a contrarian, and favorable, response to Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto. Was it evidence of violent tendencies? He’d reviewed a couple of books about back pain, and on Reddit, he wrote about suffering from a spinal condition. He was a member of a sub-Reddit devoted to efficient backpacks: Had he been planning in plain…

IN MAY 2016, in the middle of Donald Trump’s first run for president, the salad chain Sweetgreen announced a cheerful clean-eating campaign called “Make America Healthy Again” centered on the removal of bacon and Sriracha from its menus. The slogan went into disuse—it was briefly resurrected by a radiologist and Fox News contributor who released a book in 2020 by that name—until it resurfaced in grand fashion on August 23 of this year, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his presidential campaign and threw his support behind Trump. At a joint rally that night in Glendale, Arizona, Kennedy told the audience that, despite their differences on other issues, he and Trump had bonded over a shared commitment to restoring the nation’s health and fitness. “Don’t you want a safe environment…

E. C. Harrington (active: 1910s–’20s). The attorney, labor activist, and suffragette became chair of San Francisco’s newly formed Anti-Mask League during the Spanish Flu epidemic. Harrington and the league decried the mayor’s mask mandate as lacking a scientific foundation and being unhygienic and unconstitutional. Soon after the league submitted its petition, the mayor ruled that masks were no longer required. Linus Pauling (active: 1920s–’90s). In his later years, the Nobel Prize–winning chemist insisted that vitamin C could prevent up to 75 percent of cancers. The Mayo Clinic later investigated, using human patients, his claim that vitamins could cure cancer. The study did not corroborate Pauling’s results, but he repeated his belief in their veracity until his death. Lord Northbourne (active: 1930s–’40s). The agriculturalist, often credited with coining the term organic farming, published Look…